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Danse Macabre :: Кинг Стивен
Страница: 65 из 359At the horror of these sights and sounds, the maid fainted.
All that's really lacking here to make the tabloid picture complete is a scrawl of LITTLE PIGGIES or HELTER SKELTER on a nearby wall, written in the victim's blood. Stevenson further informs us that "The stick with which the deed had been done, although it was of some rare and very tough and heavy wood, had broken in the middle under the stress of this insensate cruelty; and one splintered half had rolled in the neighbouring gutter . . . .” Stevenson, here and in other places, describes Hyde as "ape-like." He suggests that Hyde, like Michael Landon in I Was a Teenage Werewolf, is a step backward along the evolutionary scale, something vicious in the human makeup that has not yet been bred out . . . and isn't that what really frightens us in the myth of the Werewolf? This is inside evil with a vengeance, and it is no wonder that clergymen of Stevenson's day hailed his story. They apparently knew a parable when they read one, and saw Hyde's vicious caning of Sir Danvers Carew as the old Adam coming out full blast. Stevenson suggests that the Werewolf's face is our face, and it takes some of the humor out of Lou Costello's famous comeback to Lon Chaney, Jr. in Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein. Chaney, playing the persecuted skin-changing Larry Talbot, mourns to Costello: "You don't understand. When the moon rises, I'll turn into a wolf." Costello replies: "Yeah . . . you and about five million other guys.” At any rate, Carew's murder leads the police to Hyde's Soho flat. The bird has flown the coop, but the Scotland Yard inspector in charge of the investigation is sure they'll get him, because Hyde has burned his checkbook. "Why, money's life to the man. We have nothing to do but wait for him at the bank, and get out the handbills.” But Hyde, of course, has another identity he can turn to. Jekyll, at last frightened back to reason, determines never to use the potion again. Then he discovers to his horror that the change has begun to occur spontaneously. He has created Hyde to escape the strictures of propriety, but has discovered that evil has its own strictures; in the end he has become Hyde's prisoner. The clergy hailed Jekyll and Hyde because they believed the book showed the grim results of allowing man's "baser nature" more than the shortest possible tether; modern readers are more apt to sympathize with Jekyll as a man looking for an escape route-if only for short periods-from the straitjacket of Victorian prudery and morality. Either way, when Utterson and Jekyll's butler, Poole, break into Jekyll's laboratory, Jekyll is dead . . .
All that's really lacking here to make the tabloid picture complete is a scrawl of LITTLE PIGGIES or HELTER SKELTER on a nearby wall, written in the victim's blood. Stevenson further informs us that "The stick with which the deed had been done, although it was of some rare and very tough and heavy wood, had broken in the middle under the stress of this insensate cruelty; and one splintered half had rolled in the neighbouring gutter . . . .” Stevenson, here and in other places, describes Hyde as "ape-like." He suggests that Hyde, like Michael Landon in I Was a Teenage Werewolf, is a step backward along the evolutionary scale, something vicious in the human makeup that has not yet been bred out . . . and isn't that what really frightens us in the myth of the Werewolf? This is inside evil with a vengeance, and it is no wonder that clergymen of Stevenson's day hailed his story. They apparently knew a parable when they read one, and saw Hyde's vicious caning of Sir Danvers Carew as the old Adam coming out full blast. Stevenson suggests that the Werewolf's face is our face, and it takes some of the humor out of Lou Costello's famous comeback to Lon Chaney, Jr. in Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein. Chaney, playing the persecuted skin-changing Larry Talbot, mourns to Costello: "You don't understand. When the moon rises, I'll turn into a wolf." Costello replies: "Yeah . . . you and about five million other guys.” At any rate, Carew's murder leads the police to Hyde's Soho flat. The bird has flown the coop, but the Scotland Yard inspector in charge of the investigation is sure they'll get him, because Hyde has burned his checkbook. "Why, money's life to the man. We have nothing to do but wait for him at the bank, and get out the handbills.” But Hyde, of course, has another identity he can turn to. Jekyll, at last frightened back to reason, determines never to use the potion again. Then he discovers to his horror that the change has begun to occur spontaneously. He has created Hyde to escape the strictures of propriety, but has discovered that evil has its own strictures; in the end he has become Hyde's prisoner. The clergy hailed Jekyll and Hyde because they believed the book showed the grim results of allowing man's "baser nature" more than the shortest possible tether; modern readers are more apt to sympathize with Jekyll as a man looking for an escape route-if only for short periods-from the straitjacket of Victorian prudery and morality. Either way, when Utterson and Jekyll's butler, Poole, break into Jekyll's laboratory, Jekyll is dead . . .